


async/await

by doug



Category: Mr. Robot (TV)
Genre: F/M, M/M, Mildly Dubious Consent, No Beta, One-Sided Attraction, Schizophrenia, Wet Dream, angst fest, cliche bingo, quasi-incest or self-cest? hmm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-15
Updated: 2020-05-15
Packaged: 2021-03-02 17:14:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,853
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24200404
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doug/pseuds/doug
Summary: Elliot strayed too far in his dream once.I've made use of S02E11 solely to please myself. Edit: this happened before I've got my hands on S04, and oh boy does this look twisted in hindsight.
Relationships: Elliot Alderson/Angela Moss, Elliot Alderson/Mr. Robot
Comments: 12
Kudos: 22





	async/await

_ monotonously _

Hey, friend. A reminder: it’s not healthy to follow me like you do, if you do. I actually hope you aren’t there right now. Thank you for never having voiced your disgust, and considering that you had the chance to see me at my lowest already, this might sound laughable to you, but I’m in a very bad state right now. 

This is yet another hidden state of the Markov’s chain that is me, revealed.

The lucid dream that I wanted to enter turned out to be not lucid at all. I know how they work: they enable you to experience whatever reality your imagination may craft. Instead, the monotone sounds of the mantra lifted me up, made me become detached and soar above it all. Reality is there, but I can’t escape it fully, nor can I get back. It’s as if the seams that used to attach my mental state to my body split and bursted. For a moment, I thought I finally broke — beyond repair, but also free.

In a lucid dream, one is able to navigate a dream fully conscious. I don’t know if I’m dreaming, but I can’t move. I lie, looking at the ceiling from under the lowered eyelids, out of sync with my own flesh.

The lights flicker. A fuzzy image appears and vanishes before my eyes like the 25th frame. Have I just seen Angela? There's her lingering scent if I concentrate hard enough. I couldn't tell her I was sorry. I should be. Our kiss on the train was not a climax, but rather a fleeting sequence that came too late into the scenario to be entranced by. A comment, not a line of the real code. It tasted stale. I felt remorse, not joy or passion. That's how I knew I wasn't dreaming.

_ pauses _

Then again, it's not something I should feel sorry about, is it? It's her own array of decisions, sorted and fed into the compiler one after another. Is it?

If I listen closer, it's almost like I can hear her from far, far away. She sounds frightened. I don't like it when she's frightened. Worried is her, exhausted is her, but not scared like this. I can picture her going to the feds, devoured and chewed by them in a matter of minutes. She has held out for so long, so many times before, but in a couple of hours she might be dealt a devastating blow. I could not lend her the bravery I possess, because mine is a drop in the ocean of hers, and so she will be destroyed. 

Which is almost too good in these circumstances. I can’t risk her again. She will be released from the clutches of my conspiracy.

Which is also too bad. Considering we are in demand, I’m sure this will accelerate an invisible hand connecting the dots. It's the sort of anticipation that chills a man, or a woman, soon to be hung, an almost-there rough texture of a noose ready to snake around their neck.

With Angela, a pretty huge part of me will be destroyed, leaving yet another hole. I’m already crumbling under a high-pitched internal alarm that serves as a soundtrack to an all-encompassing anxiety. I love her, but that feeling is somewhere on the Earth's orbit, unreachable from where I exist.

Darlene is under attack, too. I think of her, of excessive perfume and cigarette smoke, of her jagged intonations and lazy grace. In fast-forward, it's nearly palpable how the glory of the beginning of our plan has waned, sucking her life out with its decline. Now she's all dried out stone and hollow eyes where there used to be green labyrinths and fireworks. The need to watch out for everyone, including me, has taken its toll on her, naturally. I'd never want to risk her; but isn't that her decision too, after all?

I love them. I’m shit at showing it, and shit at feeling it like normal people; a shitty friend and a shitty brother, but I do.

What kind of burden exactly am I trying to take on my shoulders? How could I be so blind as to forget my weaknesses? Or, how did I muster enough courage to try and rebel against them, in the first place?

_ speaks faster  _

Anxiety bubbles all around me, bleeds into panic. A suffocating, highly prioritized process that gobbles up my resources. Despair, refined from bodily repercussions. Grief over something that hasn't occurred yet, distilled. The emotions are all bleak, though.

I used to manage to overcome it before, I know. Now it's so heavy that it severed my own connection to my tear ducts. It's so blunt it does not possess any colour, or taste, or temperature. If I went back to my body, there'd be a chance that I might expire from dry drowning.

I think of Romero and Tyrell who are so lucky, from a somewhat marginal point of view. Sheila can’t suffer anymore for my errors. Gideon is delivered from the consequences of my wrongdoings.

Aren't you afraid you'll die on me, too? We aren't that close, but I care, and apparently, care kills. It’s like drugs.

I despise myself for both caring and not caring enough.

Someone shushes me, lays a palm upon my cheek tenderly. I distantly feel myself being turned over to my stomach. Someone's fingers run through my hair, ghost-like. Shadows do not deepen in this blur I see when my head turns to the side; the mattress does not sink under the added weight. I'm in a state that reminds me of sleep paralysis that I experienced twice or thrice, maybe. Although I don't feel the usual terror associated with it, I can't come back and lift my limbs, try to fend off the monster that emerged from under the bed. 

I need to get back to myself.

I can only suppose who this is; your intelligence has obviously bore a fruit of deduction already. Don't give me a hand there, I won't return the gesture.

The identity thief never really comes when I need him, only when he decides that I need him, and hear me out when I say: those are different things.

The only one thing that is decidedly, enragingly not me. The only thing I truly deserve.

I'm fucked  _ giggles  _ up. Wish he hurried up with it.

  
  


I never see his face when it happens. Such is his twisted way of protecting me.

The first time, he jacked me off furiously, painfully even, after a fight gone savage, and it was all over sooner than I was able to process it properly. My appetite crashed the next day, and on the third day of no food he had to force some into me. In my turn, I forced myself to keep it down. Our cooperation was merely a survival instinct, not a truce.

Are you still there? Do you hear his breathing, like I do?

The second time, just before prison, he pinned me down and fucked me hard, again with no discernible intent other than to vent his — or my own — frustration. An affair worthy of Freud's commentary. I briefly wondered how it must have looked to an outsider. My best guess is pathetic, but also a bit mundane. It shouldn't come as surprising that I gave up visualizing it quickly. For me though, it was more than a real experience. The next day I had a bump on my head, bruises on my thighs, bites on my forearms, an irritated anus and a memory of an orgasm almost making me wail: mind me, I'm the silent type; but he was so overpowering and so unrelenting that it drove me — yeah, 'mad'.

The most horrifying fact about me is that I'm not horrified enough by these encounters.

So when I feel a featherlight touch on the back of my exposed neck, I brace myself.

He is acting in an unexpected way, though. It's very much concerning, how slow his movements are. His calloused fingertips travel down my spine methodically, his open palms briefly cup my waist, then come back. Hypnotizing. Exquisitely spiteful, because I wait for him to hurt me any second. 

The pain I crave never comes. Later, I'll realize that I don't know him, me, at all, if I can’t predict him, and no one could possibly come to terms with that conclusion easily, but I’ve already suspected that much.

“You’re thinking too loudly”, he whispers into my ear. “Your head will blow up. I’m not here to torture you, never was.”

Like fuck he wasn’t. Go on, I think, get the controls, I’m ready to give up. If you're being that miserable, unable to find someone else to take it out on, I don't care.

“It’s not about violence…”

_ threateningly  _ Don’t say ‘kiddo’.

“It’s not about it at all”, he whispers. “Maybe it is, in a philosophical sense. I only suggest that you listen to me. Let me guide you somewhere, just this one time.”

He doesn’t raise his voice, and that, too, is a way of protecting; but how do I know that the short-term protection is not a part of a great trap he leads me into?

“Body asleep. Mind awake.”

He chants it while continuing to touch me. I can’t let go of the tension coiling in my mind, but as I force my attention to follow his words, the train of thought slows down to a crawl. Weird; his mock presence usually has the opposite effect on me. I haven’t won back the muscle control, but I feel closer to my body now. It lies solid and so very heavy.

Along the chant, I lose my own boundaries in the room.

Then the gravity starts to seep back, newton by newton.

“You got stuck. I’m simply helping you to go back.”

The rhythm of his caresses becomes the beat of my heart. I can hear that I breathe in sync. I start to pick up an imaginary warmth as it settles down on me and wraps me up.

It's a mistake, I think sluggishly, to let him command my feelings like this and lull me into a false impression of safety.

"There's always a simple, rational explanation to me", he murmurs. "You are necessary for my existence. None of us is leaving each other, and I'm not the main character, so I must learn how to keep you alive, or die trying."

I can't feel a single muscle. Do you see him? I don’t, not lying down like this, and so I wonder: what if I imagine Angela doing this to me? The pressure he's applying instantly becomes more acute, as if it's long nails, not fingertips. 

“Whatever you want”, he whispers. “Relax. Body asleep.”

Despite the miserable circumstances, such as being intimately touched by a copy of my late dad that is a stray part of my deeply troubled personality, I don't have a great variety of options. Isn’t that inconvenient to him, though? His ultimate goal would be to pull me off the version control, instead of maintaining me like an old repo.

“Shut up”, he says, bored. “Mind awake.”

He pays attention to every erogenous zone I have, visiting them one by one like a pilgrim of faith. There's also something else, a sensation of something light and fleeting, maybe a lock of hair, that brushes over my back occasionally. Did he really shapeshift into her? The air grows hotter, and my breathing picks up. Tiny shivers rock through me when he mouths at the skin on my shoulders, or brushes his palms over my buttocks. Is that all there's to it — my subconsciousness just missing masturbation? Human contact?

I can live with this interpretation, maybe even if it destroys me.

The bed tilts slightly, and walls close in a little when his fingers sneak under my hips. I think I exhale in unison with him when a palm is wrapped around my cock.

"Mind awake", barely above the audibility threshold.

Body asleep.

Not enough, though, because I feel it respond. Each of his movements is languid and calculated, and each time, my muscles give a slightest buzz of pining for action.

Angela giving me a massage is the wildest dream I could hope for. My love for her has never been pure adoration, but this is certainly new. I focus on that fantasy, and sure, the grip feels more slender. I can almost hear her smiling as she leans forward close enough so that I can feel the warmth radiating off her, and teases me, not leaning close enough for me to feel her chest.

The hand disappears, leaving a wet trace on my stomach. My muscles spasm, chasing it, jerking my body forward. Hey, friend, do you think you know what comes after? I choose to think of Angela pegging me, but the thighs that press tightly against my hips are hairy. I have to trick myself into picturing them right, which is a problem, since I haven't seen her naked.

Let me try. When we kissed earlier today, we kissed with tongue, and it tasted sweet and exciting. She hasn't gone to her lawyer. Instead, I took her by the hand, firmly yet gently, and led to my apartment. I promised her we'd be safe, and she agreed to stay the night so that we could sate our years-long yearning for each other. We covered the distance from the subway up to my door running, laughing, exchanging small kisses when we had to catch our breaths. Never once I thought about the looming danger, and we seized the day. Now she’s...

Yeah, I’m not really buying it, either.

He lies on me, his body strained, waiting for me to react, and finally, I muster a bit of control. It feels like moving and breathing at the bottom of the ocean. As I push back against him, he exhales, "There".

Body awake.

  
  


If I stomp hard enough on my own firewall, I can see how he’s always been out there for me.

If I gut my own security system, I can admit that I bear more than a fleeting gratefulness for him.

I’m him as much as he’s me. To think of it, our primal instincts are the hardest to deflect, and so his way of bringing the connection up… deserves some credit.

I wonder if he feels the same surge of excitement. I wonder if he ever felt the same confusion as me; that this is incest as much as it’s not. He’s not my father.

I want him, in a way I wouldn’t want Alderson Sr.

I let him overwhelm me and guide me to climax expertly with more passion than I've ever shown, as I cling to the sheets and weep. My head is not swimming, my stomach does not turn inside out when I come, struggling under my father figure’s weight. Horrifying; but I guess that I only manage that because I let go. I let go of Angela, now a distant friend. I let go of my father, a person far from perfect, but the best dad I had. I let go of every thought and swap it with arousement. "You are alone", he says hastily while I'm clutched by the need to ride my orgasm out, "but you don't have to be lonely", and I think I understand him.

When I regain my breath, he falls down on his elbows and traps me underneath him, grabs my chin with one hand, covers my eyes with another and turns my head more to the side before capturing my mouth possessively. His sandpapery stubble on my lips seals my downfall, but, overcome by haze, I follow him and answer his stubborn kiss without any hesitation, still sensitive and opened up. I can taste metal as our tongues collide. It’s gagging me. I have to gulp some air, so I lean away, and a small elongated object clinks against my teeth. Mr. Robot sucks it into his mouth hastily, taking advantage of my confusion. It's a key. He swallows it.

Everything rushes out of focus.

When I open my eyes, I lie on my back. Sheets are a knot, my hoodie is drenched in sweat. My face is wet, my eyes have swollen, and Mr. Robot is nowhere in immediate sight, providing that he was there at all. I turn to the side and let the dam inside me crumble as I sob violently. My mind is delightfully empty for a few long cycles. I don't know how much time passes, but later I notice the night still peaking through my windows, and heaven’s far, where it should be.

I feel recompiled. Some of the bugs might have been fixed, some added, but it's a restart. 

I’m online.

  
  


That’s when I realise that this awakening is only a dream too, which leaves me with a question: was he there with me, or?..

  
  


I finally wake up to the rustle of paper near the door to my apartment.


End file.
